The Big 4 Interviews - Kate Forsyth
Kate Forsyth is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books for children and adults, including The Puzzle Ring, The Gypsy Crown, The Starthorn Tree, and The Wildkin’s Curse, her latest fantasy adventure for readers aged 12+. She has won or been nominated for numerous awards, including Best First Novel and a CYBIL Award in the US, five Aurealis Awards and a CBCA Notable Book. Her books are published in 13 countries around the world.
1. You’ve written more than 20 novels. Would you describe writing as more of an unstoppable compulsion or a discipline that requires great focus and energy?
Both, actually. It’s true I’m a compulsive writer. As well as writing novels, I do numerous articles every year, I blog a lot, I keep in email contact with writers all around the world, and I write in my diary most days. I’ve kept a diary since I was twelve – that’s twenty-two years of consecutive diary writing and a whole lot of shelves lined with tattered notebooks. I also have boxes full of old manuscripts. I wrote my first novel when I was seven and have never stopped since. It’d be a rare day when I don’t spend some time at least writing. And if I’m kept from my writing, I get fidgety and unhappy. Sometimes I feel as if I have a constant undercurrent of words running through my mind and the only way to stop them from damming up is to write them out.
William Gifford once described writing as “the insatiate itch of scribbling.”
Enid Bagnold said: “Writing is a condition of grinding anxiety. It is an operation in which the footwork, the balance, the knowledge of sun and shade, the alteration of slush and crust, the selection of surface at high speed is a matter of exquisite finesse. When you are without judgement and hallucinations look like the truth! When experience (which trails behind) and imagination (which trails in front) will only combine by a miracle! When the whole thing is an ambidexterity of memory and creation – of the front and the back of the brain – a lethargy of inward dipping and a tiptoe of poise, while the lasso is whirling up for words! It is a gamble, a toss-up, an unsure benevolence of God!’
(Isn’t that marvellous?)
Jean Cocteau simply asks, in despair, “This sickness, to express oneself. What is it?”
So we’ve had the writing impulse described variously as an itch, a sickness, a condition of grinding anxiety, an unsure benevolence of God … I have felt all of that and more. Yet I still love it and cannot live without it. It’s an utterly fascinating conundrum.
Dostoevsky was a compulsive writer too. He had a condition called hypergraphia caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. This is because the temporal lobe is the site of language and sound processing, memory, and emotional drive. People who have hypergraphia get an intense pleasure from the act of writing. They are driven to write regardless of whether or not they earn income from it, and whether or not anyone appreciates what they do (even though we may weep about it!)
The difference between Dostoevsky and most hypergraphics, though, is the quality of the writing. Most hypergraphics simply write long streams of meaningless gibberish that can be quite painful to read. Dostoevsky, however, brings the craftsman’s skill to the task of writing. He has discipline and design and virtuosity.
So even though I suspect my own compulsion to write borders on hypergraphia (even perhaps graphamania!), I try and bring to my writing the discipline I need to make the book the very best that I can make it. I work hard at my craft, always striving to be a better writer. I try and combine my natural flair and facility with words with technical brilliance (and fall short, as we always must).
2. You’ve played a diverse number of roles, Kate: academic, journalist, author, poet, creative writing teacher…Your schedule is mind-boggling! What’s a day in the life of the busy Kate Forsyth like?
It is busy! However, the pattern of my days depends on what stage of the book I am in. The early stages are much easier – I read a lot, daydream a lot, I have time to go to the movies, see a play or go to the ballet, and I cook delicious feasts for my family. As the action in my novels rises in pace and intensity towards the crisis, so does my life. I think about the book all the time. I dream about it at night. Often I cannot sleep because of the fever my brain is in and so I get up and work for hours in the dark and lonely quiet of the night. I begin to burn dinner. Or I cook the quickest, easiest meals I can think of so I can have more time at my computer. I began to be absent-minded. Sometimes the world of my imagination is so much more vivid than the real world that I have trouble wrenching my mind back to everyday things like making sure my poor children have clean undies. By the time I’m in the final stages of the book, I am working at it twelve hours or more a day, at white-hot intensity.
Then I finish it! I am filled with amazement at what I have wrought. I bask in the afterglow a few weeks, catching up on all the things I’ve ignored – the piles of washing and unpaid bills, my neglected husband. Then comes the editing and rewriting. I always work at fever-pitch at this stage too, wanting to stay as connected to the story as I can. Then it is delivered and goes off to the publisher, and I have to prepare to emerge, blinking at the brightness, into the glare of the publicity process. This is when I teach a lot – I turn down most teaching engagements when I’m writing – and this is when I write a lot of shorter pieces, like articles, reviews, blogs and speeches. This is actually the hardest part of the whole process because I’ll have to be out the door at 7am, facing a day of delivering 2-3 book talks a day, doing photo shoots and media interviews (I’ve done about 10 just in the past week!).
I also travel a lot while promoting, which is hard on my little family. Just in the next few months I am doing the Sydney Writers Festival, then two weeks in the UK and Greece (running a writer’s retreat); then I’m writer-in-residence at a Sydney school; then I’m appearing at the CYA Literary Festival at the NSW Writers Centre, running a workshop at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference, appearing at the Abbotsleigh Literary Festival, then I have Book Week (which is more like a month!), then the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Brisbane Writers Festival, the CYA Later, Alligator conference in Brisbane and straight back to Melbourne for WorldCon. Phew!
I’ll be looking forward to getting back to my dim and peaceful study after all of that (and my family will be looking forward to the delicious feasts!)
3. Your latest book, The Wildkin’s Curse, follows 2002’s The Starthorn Tree in the Chronicles of Estelliana. What was it like to dive back into that world after having been away so long?
I was afraid at first that the idea for the book would be stone-cold ashes and that no matter how hard I blew on them, no flicker of fire would remain. But, much to my relief and joy, I found a handful of hot coals still glowing deep in the ashes and some concentrated effort soon had the flame of inspiration leaping high again. After that, it was a joy! It was liberating to be writing fantasy again and have no shackles on my imagination, and the characters quickened for me very quickly which means the writing process was able to gallop along. I loved it!
4. Which of your many characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?
Such a difficult question! You have to be intrigued by your characters – if not utterly enthralled – if you are to spend a year writing them to life and then another year talking about them!
My very first heroine Isabeau occupies a special place in my heart – I first dreamt about her when I was sixteen and the Witches of Eileanan series changed my life, catapulting me from desperate longing and poverty into being an internationally bestselling author living the life I had always dreamed of. And she still earns me nice fat royalty cheques thirteen years later! Also, I wrote six books about her which took six years of my life. And with her red hair and laughing spirit and her blazing magical powers she certainly does burn bright!
But then what of Sara of Full Fathom Five? I spent so much of my young adulthood trying to do her story justice. And of course I love Rhiannon, the wild girl that no man can ever tame. And my four heroes in the Starthorn Tree! And Luka and Emilia in The Gypsy Crown! They came laughing and dancing and fighting into my imagination and gave me no peace till I wrote their story. Those six books in the Chain of Charms series just seemed to leap off the tips of my fingers and write themselves. And I have a very tender spot for Hannah and Donovan from ‘The Puzzle Ring’ – I love a feisty heroine and a dark and brooding hero. While my heroes from The Wildkin’s Curse’ – brave and clever Merry and Liliana, tall and strong, determined not to show her vulnerability, well, they’re just darlings.
I love all these characters and loved writing their stories. However, I have to admit the ones that burn brightest in your own mind are the ones who are jostling at your elbow while you write, talking and arguing and telling jokes you can’t help laughing at … and of course those are the characters you are writing into life right now! I’m near the end of my next book, called ‘The Starkin Crown’. It’s the sequel to ‘The Wildkin’s Curse and my hero is a teenage boy called Peregrine. Whenever I think of him I imagine a peregrine falcon soaring high in the air. He’s bright and brave and quick and generous-hearted, and if I was fifteen years old and living in the world of the book, I’d be falling in love with him, just like plain, shy, practical Molly.
You can read more about Kate here.
Check out the trailer to Kate’s latest book, The Wildkin’s Curse here.
